Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
1904
These are not ghost stories in the familiar sense. They are something older and more dangerous: tales from a Japan where the dead never truly leave, where grief and duty bind souls to the living world, and where beauty and terror are often the same thing. Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek writer who made Japan his home, collected these legends from villages and temple archives, retelling them in English of such luminous precision that they feel less like translations than hauntings themselves. A blind musician is summoned by the spirits of a defeated clan to play for them in a ruined temple, until only his ears remain. A woman with no face appears to travelers on snow-swept roads. A spirit of winter takes the form of a beautiful woman and kills without mercy. Each story carries the weight of feudal obligation, of love that survives death, of debts unpaid that stretch across centuries. Hearn wrote these tales at the end of his life, when he had become Japanese in everything but birth, and the tenderness and terror in them come from a man who understood that the boundary between this world and the next was never as solid as the living believed. These are the stories that made Japanese ghost stories literature, and they still hold the power to unsettle.
Editions
X-Ray
“also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“It is an atmosphere peculiar to the place; and, because of it, the sunshine in Horai is whiter than any other sunshine, - a milky light that never dazzles, - astonishingly clear, but very soft. This atmosphere is not of our human period: it is enormously old, - so old that I feel afraid when I try to think how old it is; - and it is not a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. It is not made of air at all, but of ghost, - the substance of quintillions of quintillions of generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, - souls of people who thought in ways never resembling our ways.””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“Now I, like that Chinese devotee, must confess myself a very ignorant person, and naturally unable to hear the conversation of Ants. But the Fairy of Science sometimes touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible, and to perceive things imperceptible.””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“Blue vision of depth lost in height, - sea and sky interblending through . The day is of spring, and the hour morning. Only sky and sea, - ... In the fore, ripples are catching a , and threads of foam are swirling. But a little further off no motion is visible, nor anything save color: dim warm blue of water widening away to melt into blue of air. Horizon there is none: only distance soaring into space, - infinite concavity hollowing before you, and hugely arching above you, - the color deepening with the height. But far in the midway-blue there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers, with high roofs horned and , - some shadowing of splendor strange and old, illumined by a .””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“Blue vision of depth lost in height, - sea and sky interblending through luminous haze. The day is of spring, and the hour morning. Only sky and sea, - ...””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They need an interpreter. It””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“upon the civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently as possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged,””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“outcome of the present struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the fact that a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons and girding itself with Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring strength against one of””
— Lafcadio Hearn
“Then again she wept aloud,– so bitterly that the voice of her crying pierced into the marrow of the listener’s bones; – and she sobbed out the words of this poem:– Hi kurureba Sasoeshi mono wo – Akanuma no Makomo no kure no Hitori-ne zo uki! (“At the coming of twilight I invited him to return with me –! Now to sleep alone in the shadow of the rushes of Akanuma – ah! what misery unspeakable!”)””
— Lafcadio Hearn
![Night Watches [complete]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-12161.png&w=3840&q=75)
